Live Digital Design

Artist and academic collective specialising in fine, digital and scenographic arts comprising Keir Williams, Joseph Fairweather Hole, Dave Meckin and invited collaborators

Live|Digital|Design is an artist and academic collective specialising in fine, digital and scenographic arts. Artists developers Dave Meckin, Clara Duran, Rhiannon Evans, Alice Helps, Keir Williams and Joseph Fairweather Hole are engaged in a series of works under the title, Dugnad. ‘Dugnad’ is a Norwegian word, which has no direct English translation. It means, work undertaken by a community for the common good. The collective has produced a series of multimedia sculptural environments in the United Kingdom and the Norwegian Arctic, based on the principle.

The artworks are a conceptual meeting place for gathered stories of human experience and social histories, and an artistic investigation to what socio-economic and geopolitical changes the specific communities are facing and may face in the future. We are using the Gulf Stream as the literal and metaphoric confluence for the project. It is a cyclical oceanic drift that is central to shifts in the atlantic climate, representing a convergence of mythological, scientific, political and economic strands of human experience. As the world has moved into a new geological age, Anthropocene, there is a perceivable effect on the Gulf Stream, a change which is parallel to that felt by communities along its course.

The work of the collective is a composition of complementary art practice. The artistic process of each member adds to the conflux of media used in creating the artworks. Physical structures produced from reclaimed materials, projected light, text and moving image, fragmented audio, song, spoken word, “whale songs” and radio noise, all elements that create unique identities of the constructed environments.